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All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a